Something Lost

Chapel 

High Life Textile Factory

Confidence. One is reminded of the, perhaps less impressive but still infamous,
story of Wright's audacious structural demonstration for the authorization
of the Johnson Wax Building's "lily pad" columns.
I fuckin love this picture and wish I were in it.

Los Manantiales restaurant

This is work of Félix Candela, "The Builder", a pioneer of thin-shell** design and made extremely successful by its relative efficiency: thin-shell construction was cheap, sustainable, and quick. The tradition has been lost, for uncertain reasons, though probably through a series of willfully faddish choices. Candela- who refused to call himself an architect- built structures of overall form not amenable to the 20th century's obsessive vision of "progress". Even I find plenty of his work aesthetically ignorable as pure objects, but this is to miss the point; Candela's buildings are not objects, they are spaces to be inhabited. And the quality of his spaces was/is great. Just as importantly, they were feasible. 

During a recent seminar at TheUofM, Juan Ignacio del Cueto posed an interior picture of a Candela work next to one of Mies van der Rohe's and I almost laughed. Of course Mies's forms have always garnered more vogue, as they manifested our collective sense of progress through their orthogonal arrangements of steel and glass, but this literally describes the whole of his design virtue. I'd much rather find myself held by Candela's curves than merely enclosed by Mies's walls.


Check out Eladio Dieste, too. (These dudes had the coolest names.)

Or Maillart:

**For Candela (and Maillart), "thin-shell" construction roughly meant the process of filling out the negative space of the structure with wooden formwork, and covering the surface- always mathematically derived, and often utilizing variations of the hyperbolic paraboloid which, mathematically though not necessarily practically, can be defined using only straight lines/boards- and covering this surface with a thin layer, sometimes as thin as ~2 cm, of cement reinforced by steel wiring. What resulted were structures of almost pure compression. (The steel reinforcement can be substituted with any number of local, renewable materials, many of which have surely yet to be discovered. Also, the necessity of reinforcement is, theoretically, only a response to human error and is not innate to the designs; reinforcement is a safeguard against potential tensile forces.) For Eladio Dieste, "thin-shell" meant substituting reinforced cement with reinforcement materials sandwiched between two layers of very thin brick. This method is arguably more sustainable and socially amicable, due to the nature of brick compared to the nature of concrete. There are many more architects who have endeavored such ideas, both before and after the ones I've mentioned.